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Sunday, April 10, 2011

Review: My Future Boyfriend

So, if you read this regularly, it may be becoming increasingly clear to you how much I enjoy (or tolerate... I'm not quite sure) bad TV and movies.

My Future Boyfriend is a gem that ABC Family gave birth to, and which premiered tonight. My friends Corrie and Alex came over to enjoy the serious badness of this ABC Family original masterpiece.

Like many TV movies, this is basically a piece of crap. It's funny, but by no means contains any strains of competency or quality. In case you haven't seen it yet and have some extreme urge to, stop reading NOW because I'm going to give away all of the plot.

Barry Watson's character Pax is from the future! He's a future archeologist who finds a romance novel written by Sarah Rue's character, Elizabeth. In the 32nd century, there is no such thing as love, and as Pax can't find any reference to the word (likely because "love" is the cause of all suffering in the world, and in the 32nd century all unpleasant things have been eliminated), he goes on an anthropological time-traveling mission to ask this author to explain to him things about love! And passion! And sex! I should also note, that in the 32nd century, people talk like robots. Barry Watson is really good at pulling this off. And by good I mean... is terrible at.

So he travels back in time and meets Elizabeth! She's getting engaged, but it's clear that she's only doing so because she feels like it's logical, not love. Also, her fiancé is a he-yuge tool, and every time he is on screen (not a lot) it's evident that he does not like anything fun, or weird, or when other men talk to Elizabeth. Blah blah blah, montages and awkward robot questions about sex later, Pax has to go back to the future and Elizabeth realizes that she might be in love with him! And that he is from the future and not crazy! Depressed in the future, now knowing the heartache and joy of love, Pax realizes that he should go back in time and meet Elizabeth literally a second BEFORE her lamey-pants fiancé would, and then they can be together! ... What?

Corrie, Alex and I all agreed that this was the absolute worst ABC Family original movie we've ever seen (and we have seen many), but this ending super-sucked! He couldn't just go back to the moment when he left her, when she knew that she liked him instead of boring-fiancé-dude? No? He had to go back and manipulate her by changing the course of history? Rule #1 of time travel is do not change anything! I think I have such problems with time-travel movies because I read H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder when I was young and both of those scared the crap out of me. The future is always dis-topic and terrifying, and you should never mess with it. While traveling back in time to see how the dinosaurs lived seems really cool, it's obvious that there are too many problems involved with that. (Instead, I will just wait for the far-less problematic reality of Jurassic Park to come to fruition.)

ANYWAY, Pax messed with freaking history and manipulated Elizabeth by changing the course of history. Cool, Elizabeth gets to move from one weirdo, un-fun, controlling boyfriend to another. And this new one doesn't even know what sex is. Welcome to some fun, Elizabeth! Now that's romance.